Cal, I love your sig. But shouldn’t it be thirteen dwarves?[/end hijack]
As Stephen King relates the story (in a footnote in Danse Macabre), Harlan Ellison was pitching an idea for a Star Trek movie to a bunch of Paramount executives. Nothing was taking, so he pulled out a hoary idea that Roddenberry himself had done to death, about the Enterprise travelling out past practically unconquerable barriers to the Edge of the Universe, and when they get to the other side, they find…
…God!
“But it’s not BIG enough!” lamented an executive.
I don’t know if the story’s true, but it was there in Danse Macabre long before they had made Star Trek II. Shatner , amazingly, seems to have ripped off what was basically a joke. Or else independently discovered Ellison’s joke. And played it for real.
Thankfully, it’s been ages since I’ve seen it … but, in the movie itself, is the being supposed to have started monotheism on Earth, or did he have nothing to do with it, and he’s just playing off the vague similarities in order to gain his freedom?
Actually, the conflict that resulted in the being being imprisioned took place millenia before man evolved ( IIRC, one bit of fallout from the fighting was that a meteor hit Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs )
Ah, but the Dinosaurs weren’t wiped out! They evolved into the uber lizards from ST:Voy’s Distant Origins.
Was Star Trek V ever on MST3k? If it wasn’t it should have been. When I watched it the first time I though I would get an explanation for the “God” character but never did. I should have expected as much from a movie that was worse than… hmm, I can’t think of anything worse.
The “god” was probably an alien. Everything religious in Star Trek is considered barbarian, or comically inane.